Flying Squirrels -lauraw November 28, 2006

We noticed these critters soaring into our locust tree one snowy night several years ago. We had come home at 11 PM after a late dinner out, and I decided to fill the birdfeeders to save time in the morning.

A few minutes later, was having a nightcap and staring into the gloom, and something whizzed by. And again. Again…it took us a while to figure out what they were.

I thought at first they had to be some kind of nocturnal bird because some of them flew in from trees fifty+ yards away. I know they’re technically gliding, but you have got to see it to understand why they’re called flying squirrels. They can change direction in air, and they tend to pull up sharply as they approach the tree they’re landing on.

Anyway, we’ve been feeding them at night ever since.

Can’t stress enough how hard it is to get a picture of these critters. They move like greased lightning among the branches, always swiveling and leaping. Almost machine-like in their speed. And, of course, it is pitch black outside so you have to be right on with the flash.

We cut that tree down recently, so hubby nailed a basket to a big maple tree out back and that is the new peanut place.

They congregate in the pines at dusk and scold me until they see me walk out with the cup of peanuts. High pitched squeaks coming from everywhere. The little ratones have got me trained.

All Winter long, we have this variety of flying squirrel, the ‘Southern’ flying squirrel. ‘Northern’ flying squirrels are more of a Canada thing, but they also have habitat in neighboring states.

We spoke to a wildlife guy who says that no one has ever seen a Northern flying squirrel in Connecticut, which is odd, because they are fairly common even slightly south of us.

We told him that in late Spring, just before we stop feeding them for the season, a larger, redder flying squirrel will show up and bully the little grey guys off the feeder at night. They also have a tendency to go to the ground a little, whereas the greys never touch land. We had always assumed they were Northern flying squirrels.

He was actually hinting that killing one might be the easiest thing to do.
I’m not spending my spare time trying to figure out how to kill a chipmunk-sized piece of lightning, if the guy is too damn lazy to come out the house and see for himself that’s his problem.

I guess the funniest thing in my neck of the woods is when my old man fires his pellet gun into a tree hoping to dislodge a squirrel nest. Usually, he misses by a mile. Next, he tries to lob smoke bombs into the tree and misses just as poorly.

Out of nowhwere, they attack.
The cute little squirrels jump on your face and gnaw at your eyeballs, lips, and earlobes. Yeah, sonny, it’s an ugly way to go. I watched a dozen men in my unit get eaten alive by those squirrels. They’re the devil incarnate, I tell you. Pure evil.

We’ve got a red squirrel that lives in the maples across the street from our house who’s got MAYBE a half inch of tail left. We first saw him a couple of years ago, and at first, I thought he lost it to the tires of a car, but then I started seeing other squirrels with shortened tails within four or five blocks of our house. We figure that the late spring freeze we had a couple of years ago caught a whole litter of squirrel kits in a shabbily insulated nest and froze off their tails, much like you’ll see the ear ends of newborn calves frozen off after a particularly nasty blizzard.

We refer to him as “Stumpy”, and he looks damn unnatural jumping from tree to tree without a tail, kind of like a skinny groundhog. Whenever he comes over to eat crabapples from the tree in our front yard our cats sit in the window & watch him like kids camped out in front of a Barney video.

I’ve never seen flying squirrels in this part of the country. Those little varmits would be damn entertaining to watch.

Right after college, I rented an apartment in the “less affluent” part of Des Moines. I lived in a big ‘ol masonry house that had been subdivided into four apartments, and we were surrounded by lots of big oak trees with an open garage out back. There was a small porch on the back of the house, and I used to sit out there drinking beers after work sometimes. My drinking buddies and I made friends with an urban raccoon who had no fear of people, and we used to bring out a cereal bowl so that our ‘coon could have his own beer & not have to mooch off any of us. He would just walk up on the porch & drink his Busch while keeping one eye on us laughing drunks the whole time.

Some of the less PC of my buddies used to refer to the ‘coon as “our friend from the hood”, and would ask him “hey, where’s your Raiders jacket?” while he was drinking his bowl full of beer. I don’t know what happened to him after I moved out, but I hope he didn’t get whacked by some freaked out non drinker who was worried about why this raccoon with the DT shakes kept knocking on the window while holding a bottle opener and an opened can of Pringles.

If anyone’s interested in more of my boring stories about wildlife, I could tell the one I heard from my father about “that unlucky squirrel and the reason why Iowa State University took handguns away from their campus security officers”.

Thing is, Russ, you never see them because they’re nocturnal. This was a totally flukey situation over here. We just had the perfect tree. 45 feet tall (they have to be able to glide to the bottom of the next tree), lots of cover from owls, and a protected spot to dine from in the conifers nearby.

The first time we saw them it was snowing pretty hard, and we got the definite impression that they were starving and had come a ways.

Our yard was like an airport that night, so many of them flitting into the tree from all directions, we kept refilling the fork and they didn’t even care that we were standing right next to the tree staring at them.

The only other person I know who has seen them has a horse barn several towns away, and her loft is infested with them.

No one else around here has seen them or even heard of them being here, except the neighbors and friends that we’ve shown.

I realize that a nocturnal critter is much harder to see, but I’ve never seen a dead one on the side of the road, the landing skids they leave in the snow, or any sign of them in all my years of sitting in the woods with a loaded gun. I suppose we’ve got them, but the fox squirrels (I mistakenly called Stumpy a Red Squirrel, when he’s actually a Fox Squirrel – sorry about that) are pretty much the dominant ones in this part of the state. Grays are more common in the Eastern part of Iowa, since I’ve seen plenty of them in the City Parks in Iowa City or Cedar Rapids, but we don’t get as many of them out here in the South Central part of Iowa.

Grays (and flyers, I guess) are more adapted to forests, while Foxes are adapted to mixed forest/cropland/pasture cover like we’ve got around here.

It is my understanding that flying squirrels almost never touch ground.
The Northern will, looking for fallen fruit, nuts or buried edible (to them) fungus near the base of a tree, but I don’t know how you’d distinguish that from the marks of a chipmunk, mouse, or other squirrel.
‘me put it to you this way: you see birds all the time, yeah? Thousands upon thousands of them.

Not a lot of birdkill lying about, is there? You’d think, with all the birds we see every day, the carcasses would be everywhere to be found. But they are not.

Rufous-sided Towhees abound in this area, I hear. Have never seen a live one. Only one dead one, on a hike. Looked fresh, too, like something had just killed it and ran away as we approached.

I never knew we had so many goldfinches until I put out black thistle seed. They appeared in so many numbers I was flabbergasted.

The only time I’ve ever seen a goldfinch other than on a feeder was once, on a fence laden with bindweed by an empty lot. Once.

And then they have the nerve to show up in the dozens and fight over my paltry four-post feeder.

Baltimore Orioles? Seen them only twice in the wild in all my thirty-six years. And I have done a lot of hiking in their prime habitat. A LOT of hiking. My husband has seen their nests on walks in the woods, but never the bird.

Put a ground-level birdbath in my yard near some flowering/fruiting trees, now I see them almost every day in the Summer, splashing around like they don’t care who sees them.

Tell me about it. They’re thicker than hell around here. I live within three blocks of the East edge of our small town, and I can hear them singing out by the limestone quarry about half a mile East of me on clear nights. Out on the farm where I grew up, they used to come up in the yard and have “rap-offs” with our old border collie. The only thing thicker than coyotes in Iowa is deer. I swear to God, they’re almost as common as farm animals out here. We’ve got ones out at our South place that come up and eat from the salt feeders right along with the cows.

The coyotes stay well fed on deer they kill themselves and roadkill deer, plus housepets and dead farm animals. We’ve even gotten bobcats back in the state (I saw one a few years ago on a Saturday afternoon, pure luck that I saw it), and mountain lions have even started to come back. My brother-in-law saw one crossing a road in front of his combine last fall, and a couple of them have been killed by cars in the Western part of Iowa. Some of the “black helicopter” crowd think the Dept. of Natural Resources is bringing them in to control the deer, but that’s just crazy talk. Cougars are like any other predator. They’ll eat deer if that’s the easy thing to catch, but as long as there are housecats and foo-foo lap dogs to be had, deer won’t be at the top of their shopping list, unless you consider roadkill. Housepets are like the McDonalds drive up to a top predator like a cougar, or maybe the White Castle, depending on the size of the pet.

Most of the state/county roadkill cleaning crews just throw the carcasses further into the right-of-way ditch, which means you see a LOT of carrion eaters along the roads partaking of the feast.

I’m just saying that I don’t think this part of the state is overly friendly to “thick forest” critters like flying squirrels. If they DID live around here, they’d have a hard time jumping from tree to tree, unless they just cruised around the same seven or eight trees over & over again all night like teenagers with Dad’s car on Friday night.

Geez, who’s the movie retard that doesn’t know the difference between me & shark boy? I proved with perfect, geometric logic that my movie kicked the hell out of that FX laden piece of crap, and I had the disadvantage of having Fred Freakin’ McMurray starring with me.

You guys get flying squirrels, and ferral cats, true I had those two visits from the racoon, but other than ordinary everyday long tailed rats, my wild-life consists of kids in $300 cars, with $5K sound systems STILL listening to “my name is (slim shady)” except for when I was living elsewhere, like in cocoa beach, with roaches the size of your flogging head, Oki, where you would unscrew your light bulbs so that the cycada’s would stop flying into the window sounding like artillery, and the palms where you lay flat on your bed, lean over, shake your socks to make sure there isn’t a scorpion or a brown recluse is in there.

I need better wildlife in my life!

OH! I did see a whiled burrough, or mule like creature on my way back from lake havasu, of course, I didn’t see it very early on, so I had to slam on my breaks (only time I ever engaged “anti-lock” in my own car while driving) swerve out of it’s path and wind up in the wrong lane face the wrong direction, but hey!

It just struck me as an unusual spelling mistake. You obviously hear your words and then write them down as quickly as you can, so you’re phonetically accurate. To complicate two words as you did, still create two valid words, and maintain the phonetic accuracy – well, that’s an indication of how bright you really are.

I alternate between writing per an inner voice and writing per visualized instruction and feedback. The former is better for prose quality and the latter is better for analytic content and proofreading. Unfortunately the latter mode has dominated my writing for the bulk of my professional career, which is one reason I started writing comments and blog posts.

Visual versus auditory processing and thinking is a fascinating topic, and one that I want to write about some day. I’ve got Marshall MacLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy, which talks about the transformation of humankind from a talking/singing/listening creature to a reading/watching/writing creature. There was a study a couple of years ago on the same topic, where they claimed that our brains were changing as a result of the strong preference for visual information processing.

I’m wordy on the net, sometimes, when I feel the need to, and actually do intimidate people (more common than I like) to shutting up. I get wordy, cuz I want people to understand every word I’m saying, since I so rarely get a chance to (not on the net, but in life, I’m a very quiet guy, I litteraly go days without speaking a single word to a single person even though I interact with people regularly.)

I’m not some closet ivory tower lecturer, I’m the contained bookworm dork (with a better body, in all likeliehood, than you :) doing his best to write what he thinks, in the same ways that he has read them.

At my best, I’m a plagiarist of grammar, at my basic, I would come off as a buffoon. I know I engage in buffoonery, but I’m rarely ever a buffoon, exept for the apologencia of my own specific failure already mentioned.

The only reason I have “prose” as michael said, is because I stole the techniques of written language from some very talented people.

Now SPEAKING!?

Thats different.

I developed a deap voice (BTW, does anyone realize that our VOICES are CHOICES? we TRAIN our voices?) cuz my family has deep voices, unfortunately I only developed two.

“projecting” (loud) and “severe” (subtle and soft) so I tend to blow out my voice in the real world.

unless they just cruised around the same seven or eight trees over & over again

Wow Russ, its so hard for me to imagine that.

A flying squirrel could probably make it across this state in any number of ways without ever touching the ground. When you climb up on a hill and get a panoramic view of Connecticut, you’re pretty much just looking at trees.

Amen, Brother.
I used to be a DJ, the radio kind not the rappin’ kind, and I was able to change my voice into the ballsy, wimmin pleasin’, instrument that it is today.

OK, not so much anymore cause I’m out of practice.

I think ‘Everyone’ should be forced to listen to at least an hours recording of their own voice. The world will be a better place when these whiners, cretins and losers realize how they sound and quit.

OK that’s Not Gonna Happen.

The other day I was listening to some TV show Mrs. G had on in the other room. The words were indistinct but the Tone of the voice was clear. After about ten minutes of listening to this terrible “song”, I went in to see who was speaking.
It was Heidi Klum.
I know that most of the IB dudes would have her on the “I’d Hit It” list and Wickedpinto already has, but Dude, I’d recommend doing it in a Monastery or someplace where talking isn’t allowed.

We’ve got trees, but it’s not as thick as you’ve got up in the Northeast. In Iowa, you’ve basically got trees concentrated along river valleys and creeks, with some of the original prairie oak savannahs still around. You also see trees in areas where OLD farmsteads were located (houses built between the Civil War and WW2 that have been gone for years). The timbered land my family owns is mostly oak, elm and walnut trees (with some crap trees mixed into the bag – no offense DinT) in the established parts, with patches of hickory and some areas of hedgeapple trees (osage orange) & red sumac that have grown up on the fringes of pastured open spaces. Unless you’re in a river valley, most stands of timber in Iowa are small groups of trees separated from each other.

Fox squirrels are better adapted to open cover than gray squirrels, and they are dominant here. The grays could still get by with the timbered areas we’ve got here, but I think the foxes drive them out, kind of like you see coyotes drive out red foxes when they move into an area. I’m just assuming that the fox squirrels also put pressure on flying squirrels too, since they would be competing for den space & the like.

We might have the little fellas here in certain places, but I’ve never seen them. Of course, like you said, unless you’re looking for them they’re hard to find.

Sorry RG, I know exactly what that is. You have to remember that I am an anachronism. I even disdain mp3 players and such on the grounds that I think that their use in public is incredibly rude. To me, those little white cords coming out of someone’s ears are basically saying, “F— off, I don’t want to talk to you.”

Maybe it’s just because I am a Southerner. Down here, we tell our life stories to total strangers in the line at the grocery store.

I never claimed I was from the Middle Ages. I merely said that I know pop culture from the ’30s-’50s much better than pop culture from any of the decades in which I have actually been alive. And that makes me an anachronism.

[…] March 19, 2007 Posted by Michael in History, Music. trackback There were a couple of earlier posts right here and here at Innocent Bystanders that have made us the site to rely on for breaking news about […]

We have a flying squirrel, his name is Rascal and a “ball of lightening” doesn’t even do him justice. My mom’s neighbor in MO fell a tree and his mom ran away leaving him and a brother all alone. Years ago when we were kids my mom had raised one from a fallen tree, so the neighbors having heard the stories of “George” brought these to her. We’ve had Rascal about 5 years now, he’s a real joy and a great source of entertainment. Has to be the world richest squirell. My husband has built an awesome habitat for him, hollow log included. He has several staches of pecans (his favorite) all over our house to include the binds of photo albums, every window seal, atop the drapery and just about any other place one could imagine. (Yes of an evening, he’s allowed run of the house) It’s a real treat when we have company, his favorite thrill is to run up your pant leg and right under your shirt. He then takes a few laps around your torso as you jump and dance around squeeling, only to come out the neck or sleeve of your shirt and jump to the next awaiting person. Once he’s calmed down a bit, which doesn’t last long, everyone is amazed at how very soft his fur is. He has been known to sit for awhile in a loose pocket of your shirt or jacket, but he absolutely under no circumstances wants to be held. If I knew of a way to post a picture, I would. I have one of him in my pocket while I fixed pies for Thanksgiving. If you ever have the chance to own one as a pet, I’d highly recommend it.

My toddler found one in our house today! We captured it and it’s in my laundry basket.. going to let it go before it gets dark. I live in East Texas and I had NO idea they were in this part of the US. So cute!

I THINK ALL YOU PEOPLE ARE CRAZY AND STUPID!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and i dont know why you are talking about your damn family aka wifes if this is a web site about flying squirrels. but i like flying squirrels. How long do flying squirrels last?

Flying squirrels will live for a surprisingly long time in captivity if you give fresh food plus commercial food formulated for flying squirrels. Ten years or more.
In the wild they usually succomb to predation or calcium deficiency in a few years.

The squirrel food corrects the deficiency and as long as you don’t have any cats or children, predation won’t be an issue either.

My wife Terri and I live in Southwest Mo. , in a small country comunity called Cape Fair , we moved out here from California around 20 years ago “you know “, trading in the rat race for some peace in a much mellower environment near the lake ( Table Rock ) anyway our property is abundent with nature , to make a long story shorter , about 9 or 10 years ago we started noticing the flying squirrels in the night gliding from tree to tree , bird feeder to bird feeder , only a couple came at first , then as time went on more began to show I don’t know for sure but exactly how many are here , but I know we go through 5 – 6 , 40lb. bags of feed a week for our little friends, when we get home, the little guys wait for the outside light to come on, then they know that they only have a few minutes before the feed is put into the feeders, it only takes a few seconds before they are all out and about making there little chirping noise ready to devour the food.
Just a thought… what do you call a group of flying squirrels ??
A Flock ?, A Pack ?, A Cuvy ? ,

That’s insane. I threw a bowlful of peanuts out there once a night and that’s it. You know that they compulsively store a lot of that food, right? The tree hollows around your property must be absolutely loaded with seed!

I live in the Naugatuck Valley. Last week, I saw 2 flying squirrels in my backyard. It was dark, I saw something fly and land on the tree, first I thought it was a bat.

Then I got my flashlight and saw it was a flying squirrel. He was very fast to maneuver around the tree, I noticed that he seemed to be walking under the tree branches most of the time.

As it was dark, it was hard to track him, the white under his belly was the thing to watch to follow him, it was usually pointed up, as I stated earlier he was mostly walking under the tree branches making the white belly easy to see.

A few minutes later, I saw another white belly scampering around the tree.

They stayed until the neighborhood cat walked on by, then they must have left. I did not see them leave.

I have lived in my home for about 13 years, this is the first time I ever saw a FS.

Normally I don’t look out my windows at night, but lately I have been putting corn out for the deer, so I have been watching them from my window for several hours a night. That’s what I was doing when I saw these flying squirrels.

This entire thread brings back very fond memories and lots of laughs. When I was a little kid, maybe 7ish, we kept a pet flying squirrel for a kid down the street for awhile while he was gone. He’d bottle raised the squirrel from a baby. I LOVED that thing!! Would take him out in the very middle of the back yard. We had a fairly large back yard, one of those that doesn’t have any trees in the middle but has them almost all the way around the edges, and those were mostly pretty large trees too (great for climbing!).

Anyhow, once out in the middle of the yard, I’d cup him in both of my hands and really carefully go WAY down with my arms, bending my knees so my hands were almost to the ground and almost between my legs – and then super fast launch him straight up into the air! You’d do it carefully so he didn’t tumble, just straight up, as high as you could possibly toss him.

He loved it too – he’d stay all tucked up in a tight little ball until he hit the top of the arc, then suddenly POOF, spread all four legs out and glide to a tree… somehow it was always a surprise how he could suddenly get so huge….then once he landed, usually a good ways up a tree, I’d run over to whatever tree he’d landed on… always just a little scared that maybe this time he wouldn’t come back, but sure enough, every time, he’d scoot right down to me, hop onto my hands, and out we’d go into the middle of the yard again for another launch! Talk about an absolute blast for a little kid. :-D

Funny how this hadn’t ever dawned on me before…. but I’ve always pictured Flyer to have been about the size of a typical grey ground squirrel, only with the addition of the skin between his legs…. but I guess he must have been a lot smaller, since my hands were so much tinier back then too!

This was in the Ft. Worth Texas area… is there any significant size difference in flying squirrels from different parts of the country? I had assumed that sugar gliders were a good bit smaller than flying squirrels, but maybe I’m off there too? I had NO idea flying squirrels could live so long, I guess I’d assumed they were more like hamsters, so I was surprised to read above that they can live 10 to 12 years. That’s really neat!

Apparently in captivity they live much longer not only because of lack of predation, but because the calcium deficiency that plagues them in the wild is corrected in the feed & supplements they get while in human care.

This post is more than two years old, and I have not been feeding them anymore because the other trees are so far away that it’s a pain in the butt in Winter to trudge out there in the snow and cold at night, and I’d never see them anyway.

The flying squirrels and nice shade are the only reasons I miss that messy old Locust tree that used to be up here near the house. It was splitting in half starting right at the crotch we used to put the peanuts in, and had to be cut down.

The best way is to shoot the nest with a 12 gauge shotgun at full choke. Do this around noon, when they are all cuddled up and sleeping. Shoot the nest out of the tree, and then two or three times on the ground to be sure.

Actually, getting close enough to burn or shoot the varmints could cost you your life. Any decent home improvement store should carry Rodent Claymores right next to the Wasp spray & the mothballs. You can either set them up with a command detonator, or rig them to a trip wire, but I wouldn’t recommend the latter if you’ve got outside pets of your own. But then again, outside pets are usually the first victims of flying squirrels.

One important thing to remember: If you don’t know the difference between convex and concave, Rodent Claymores may not be the right tool for you.

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